Eleven months after the death of its star, Angela Lansbury, shortly before her 97th birthday, a big-screen version of the popular detective series Murder, She Wrote has been announced.
The film has been written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, whose previous credits include the Seth Rogen/Paul Dano fact-based Dumb Money, which has just premiered at the Toronto film festival. Former Sony boss Amy Pascal is also attached as a producer, but no director or star has yet been named.
The original show scored an Emmy nomination for Lansbury for each of its 12 seasons, running between 1984 and 1996. She played Jessica Fletcher, a mystery writer and amateur sleuth who investigates the endless corpses that appear in her New England seaside town.
Analysis by BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme in 2012 named Cabot Cove the murder capital of the world, with a resident death rate that far exceeded Honduras, then the real-life murder capital of the world, with a violent killing every 74 minutes.
In season eight, Fletcher is employed as a professor of criminology in New York City, where she is confronted with a more plausible amount of slaughter.
At its peak, the show attracted weekly audiences in the US of more than 25 million; it was also widely syndicated and popular around the globe.
Lansbury won four Golden Globes for her work on the series, but failed to convert any of her Emmy nominations into a win – itself a record.
A decade ago, NBC announced a planned reboot with Octavia Spencer as a “hospital administrator and amateur sleuth who self-publishes her first mystery novel”.
Although the casting met with Lansbury’s approval, the title – and any sense Spencer’s character would share a name with hers – did not. The reboot was cancelled three months later.
